Reasonable Faith: Question 115 - Santa Claus, Tooth Fairies, and God
There are sound arguments for God’s existence. Some of them are very good. But suppose it were not so; suppose all the arguments for God fail and there are no further good reasons to believe in God. What follows?—Atheism? It’s very important to realize that the answer to this question is NO. What follows is, at most, soft agnosticism.
When Does Absence of Evidence = Evidence of Absence? (Or, when is the inference from “I see none” to “there is none” valid?)
What I have said so far raises the question, When does the absence of evidence become evidence of absence? This is a good question because sometimes (but not always) the former implies the latter. Let’s start with some examples to work with.
Example 1. Elephants in the Room (Absence of Evidence = Evidence of Absence)
Someone asks, “Are there any elephants in the room?” After looking about and seeing none, I say, “No, I see none. There are no elephants in the room.”
The inference from “I see none” to “There are none” in this example is justified. With respect to elephants in this room, I’m not agnostic; rather, I positively affirm: There are no elephants in the room. In this case, absence of elephants in the room is evidence of their absence. But this inference doesn’t hold for Example 2.
Example 2. The Grand Canyon Fly (Absence of Evidence ≠ Evidence of Absence)
We’re standing atop the Grand Canyon and someone asks, “Is there a fly way down there?” After a quick glance I say, “No, I see none. There is no fly down there.”
As in the last example we move from “I see none” to “There is none”—but unlike the last example the conclusion is unjustified. Agnosticism regarding the fly is the appropriate response here. So in the Elephant Example we don’t have to be agnostics, but in the Grand Canyon Fly Example we do. Why? Notice that it is not the relative size of the object which creates the difference (The zookeeper might have asked you on your zoo trip, “Do you think an elephant is in the cage in the next room?” to which your reply might be agnosticism: “I have no idea. Maybe.”)
The salient difference between these two examples has entirely to do with your epistemic situation — which is, roughly, the extent and limits of your ability to know something through your primary sources of knowing (i.e. perception, memory, introspection, testimony, etc.) — and the fact that only in one situation (Elephants in the Room) do we expect to have knowledge which we lack. My epistemic situation regarding knowing whether an elephant is in the room is quite good, while my epistemic situation regarding knowing whether a fly resides at the bottom of the Grand Canyon is quite poor. Why? When are we in an epistemically good situation in order to say, “There is no X”? What conditions have to be met? At least two. In the absence of evidence of an object O you may deny that O exists only if these Criteria are met:
Evidence Expectation Criterion. If an object O existed, then we would expect there to be evidence for it.
Knowledge Expectation Criterion. If there were evidence of object O, then we would expect to have knowledge of the evidence.
In short, in the absence of evidence, we can deny the existence of something O only if we should expect to possess evidence sufficient to know that O exists but in fact lack it.
Some Examples: Tooth Fairies, Leprechauns, Santa Claus, Teapots, and Invisible Objects
Atheists claim they don’t need to disprove God for the same reason they don’t need to disprove the existence of Tooth Fairies, leprechauns, and Santa Claus. The problem with the comparison with the last two items is that, while our epistemic situation regarding God doesn’t always satisfy the Evidence Expectation and Knowledge Expectation Criteria, our epistemic situation regarding leprechauns and Santa Claus does — we can, and do, disprove them all the time; it’s just that there are few, if any, people arguing for their existence so we’re never called upon to give those reasons. If Santa existed we should expect to see, but don’t, lots of evidence of that fact, including warehouses at the North Pole, a large sleigh, and so forth; similarly, were there biologically tiny human beings on this planet we should expect to see, but don’t, their evidence: miniature villages, waste products, the bones of their deceased — evidence similar to what we have for mice, hamsters and other small critters. If there were more people today who made a case for leprechauns and Santa Claus then it would be entirely appropriate for us to enter into dialogue with them, giving reasons for their non-existence.
At this point an atheist might object that the Tooth Fairy is different from leprechauns and Santa Claus because she’s invisible. (Is she invisible in the story?) Suppose she is invisible. According to the tale she collects teeth left under children’s pillows leaving behind a reward (usually money). Evidence we should expect to see if she existed then would be money left behind, stolen teeth, etc. Do we find such evidence? Well, no we don’t, but we would expect to if she existed. So, even the Tooth Fairy satisfies the Evidence Expectation and Knowledge Expectation Criteria. So because we lack evidence of her, we say she doesn’t exist (sorry kids!).
Suppose the atheist agrees that the reason why we deny Tooth Fairies, leprechauns and Santa Claus is because we do have evidence for their absence. He might nonetheless insist that the situation is significantly different for other objects which are causally isolated from us. A case in point is Russell’s famous teapot which circles about the sun, an object which is (for the most part) causally isolated from us. Do we need to be agnostic about it? Can we say it doesn’t exist? I think we know it doesn’t exist because it wasn’t put there by the Russian or American astronauts; and we know that matter in the universe does not self-organize into teapot shapes. So really, we have a great deal of evidence that Russell’s teacup doesn’t exist; and since our discussion is confined to cases where we infer the non-existence of something simply on the basis of absence of evidence for it, the example is irrelevant.
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